The Hacker News | Expert Insights

For years, our industry has treated “blocking” as the gold standard. If the email didn’t land, if the malware didn’t execute, if the alert fired in the SIEM, we called it a win. That mindset made sense in a world where most attacks came through a handful of familiar doors. But AI has changed the game. We’re not dealing with hobbyists sending out clumsy phishing attacks anymore. Modern adversaries are running multi‑channel, AI‑assisted businesses at machine speed. And if all you’re doing is blocking at the edge, you’re not really defending. You’re just delaying. Generative AI has made it trivial to spin up highly personalized, multi‑step social engineering campaigns that operate simultaneously across email, collaboration apps, mobile, social media, and paid media. The result is a social engineering attack chain : a sequence of stages designed to manufacture trust, erode judgment, and bypass brittle controls. You don’t beat that by tuning another filter. You have to disrupt the at...

Modern attacks are not primarily defeating infrastructure. They are inheriting trust. Identity Did Not Become Important. It Became Infrastructure. Security teams still talk about identity as though it is one security discipline among many, sitting beside endpoint protection, cloud security, network defense, and vulnerability management. That framing no longer reflects how modern enterprises actually operate. Modern business environments run on identity, delegated trust, cloud roles, automation pipelines, APIs, machine permissions, and continuously exchanged credentials. Users authenticate into SaaS platforms that the organization does not own. Workloads assume permissions that nobody provisions manually. Services trust other services built across years of acquisitions, migrations, technical debt, and operational compromise. The enterprise is no longer running on infrastructure alone. It is running on identity. Attackers recognized this shift before many defenders did. That i...

Launching a ransomware attack used to take real effort. Now, thanks to AI, almost anyone can launch a sophisticated attack, which changes the game for everyone responsible for protecting businesses. Reconnaissance that once took hours now takes minutes. Phishing emails that used to require careful crafting can now be generated at scale and sent to hundreds of targets simultaneously. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that AI reduced the time required to create phishing emails from 16 hours to just 5 minutes. For MSPs managing dozens or hundreds of clients, and for internal IT teams holding the line across an entire organization, understanding how AI is changing ransomware is key to staying ahead of the threat and minimizing disruption when attacks occur. The attack that starts in the inbox Before attackers can encrypt files or demand a ransom, they first need a way into the organization. One of the easiest ways to get that access is by tricking someone into cli...

The disclosure of CVE-2026-25177, a high-severity privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services, is a timely reminder that identity infrastructure remains one of the most consequential attack surfaces in the modern enterprise. Rated HIGH with a CVSS score of 8.8, this vulnerability allows an authenticated domain user to escalate privileges and move laterally across the network without elevated starting permissions or any user interaction. The mechanics are instructive. If a compromised account holds native Active Directory (AD) permission to modify Service Principal Names (SPNs), an attacker can create a duplicate SPN for a targeted service. When clients request Kerberos authentication, the domain controller may issue a ticket encrypted with the wrong key, causing a denial of service or forcing a fallback to the weaker NTLM protocol. No access to the targeted server is required beyond that initial SPN-write permission. In an environment where Active Directo...

The structural flaw in detection-only security postures runs deeper than tooling choices. Every hour a security team spends triaging runtime alerts is an hour not spent governing what entered the pipeline in the first place. And in modern CI/CD environments, that means the handful of alerts that represent genuine software supply chain compromise arrive only after the malicious dependency has already executed its payload, exfiltrated credentials, or established persistence inside the environment. The industry built an entire market category on that backwards logic, and enterprises are now paying for it in breach costs, developer burnout, and regulatory exposure that carries personal liability for the security leaders whose names appear on the program. The shift that actually reduces risk is not better monitoring at the end of the pipeline; it is governing the point of ingestion before code ever enters your lifecycle, which is a fundamentally different problem requiring a fundamental...

Microsoft Teams' cross-tenant collaboration feature, which allows external accounts to message employees directly, is enabled by default in most enterprise deployments . Most organizations have never audited or restricted it. That default setting has become one of the more reliable social engineering entry points security teams are managing today. The base attack is straightforward. An attacker creates an external Teams account, identifies a target through LinkedIn or a company directory, and sends a message posing as IT helpdesk staff. The message cites an urgent account issue (an MFA problem, a security alert, a failed login) and asks the employee to open Quick Assist, a built-in Microsoft remote assistance tool, and approve a session. What has changed recently is the layer added on top of that initial contact: an AI-generated voice that sounds like someone the target already knows. How the Base Attack Chain Unfolds Once Quick Assist access is established, the attack fol...

AI is changing the security landscape. More and more threat groups incorporate LLMs into their reconnaissance and exploitation workflows. The notion that some vulnerabilities are too complex to implement is now obsolete. Using LLMs, hackers can automatically find and exploit complex vulnerabilities. We have all heard of Claude Mythos and its ability to identify vulnerabilities in large codebases and exploit them automatically. But LLMs can do more than find vulnerabilities in code. ShinyHunters has scanned thousands of Salesforce Sites. They used a modified version of "AuraInspector". They possibly used an LLM to code their framework, mods, reconnaissance tools, and other aspects of their workflow. But the next step is to use AI to supercharge the attack process itself. We at Reco decided to explore what it would look like. Reco's security research team built an AI-powered agent capable of performing end-to-end security assessments of Salesforce Experience Cloud sit...